What Happens When You Put an Art Fair Inside a Palace Full of Secrets?

Built in 1876 to the designs of Józef Huss, the neo-Renaissance palace Villa Róż has lived several lives, from private residence and diplomatic outpost to bureaucratic machine. For decades it housed the British Embassy, and traces of that existence remain embedded in its architecture. Heavy vault doors stand guard over rooms once used to protect sensitive information. And upstairs, an eerie looking incinerator still survives, where confidential documents could be reduced to ash at a moment’s notice. It is within the walls of this storied building that this year’s edition of Art Warsaw took place from 21–24 May.

While many fairs spend enormous effort neutralising their surroundings, it feels very much as though the opposite instinct prevails here. This year’s edition follows earlier chapters at NADA Villa Warsaw and last year’s Art Warsaw Miodowa, staged inside a former hospital complex. Both projects helped establish a format that feels closer to a citywide exhibition than a conventional art fair. Behind it are Joanna Witek-Lipka, long-time director of Warsaw Gallery Weekend, and Michał Kaczyński, co-founder of Raster Gallery.

“I think there were several reasons why we decided, once again, to base the project in a historic villa,” founder Joanna Witek-Lipka tells me. “On one hand, it’s a reference to the original Villa project organised by Raster gallery fifteen years ago, which, in the context of the development of the Polish art scene today, has taken on a much broader meaning. The art world calendar is already saturated with conventional fair formats. What might initially seem like a challenge – uneven spaces, historical interiors, the absence of neutral white walls – we actually see as an advantage. The artworks gain a new context and often resonate much more powerfully than they would inside a traditional white cube.”

Weaving through Villa Róż’s labyrinthine corridors, it is difficult to disagree. The fair gathers more than fifty galleries from across Europe, Asia and North America. At this size, the atmosphere manages to remain intimate. Among my most intriguing discoveries was Tokyo-based gallery WAITINGROOM’s solo presentation of Rikako Kawauchi. Across paintings, drawings and sculpture, Kawauchi explores the unstable boundaries between body and mind, self and other. Her tactile lines, gouged into thickly applied paint and stone, trace forms that seem to emerge and dissolve at once.

Nearby, Prague’s Hunt Kastner brought together works by three female artists, Dominika Dobiášová, Anna Hulačová and Eva Koťátková. Dobiášová’s dreamlike figures occupy worlds suspended between fairy tale and nightmare, while Hulačová’s sculptures merge organic and brutalist forms into uncanny post-human futures. Koťátková’s work, including an impressively constructed metal sculpture of a seashell, has long been concerned with systems of authority, feeling particularly potent inside the context of Villa Róż.

Elsewhere, one of the fair’s most moving works appeared at Lisowski Gallery’s presentation. Bogna Burska’s Breathe, created in collaboration with Daniel Kotowski, offered an earlier iteration of ideas that would evolve into this year’s Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The work begins with a deceptively simple observation: underwater, spoken language collapses, while sign language remains fully communicative.

Referencing The Little Mermaid, the video ruminates on voice, exclusion and power. Underwater, Burska loses her primary means of communication, while Kotowski’s signing continues uninterrupted. The work subtly reverses assumptions about ability and disability, drawing attention to what Kotowski has elsewhere described through the concept of “deaf gain” – the idea that deafness represents not a deficit but a different mode of perception.

Alongside established names at the fair, there remained room for younger and more experimental voices. That spirit was embodied by Szaber, the artist-run gallery and collective whose presentation included paintings by co-founder Sebastian Mikoś. Among the standouts was an image of a vulture attached to a hanging coat – ominous and slightly absurd.  This coexistence of different generations, scales and geographies is central to Witek-Lipka’s vision.

“From the very beginning, it was important for us that galleries from our region would have strong visibility at Art Warsaw,” she explains. Alongside leading Polish galleries, participants arrived from the Czech Republic, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine. “We believe Warsaw can act as a representative platform for the region – a place where these local voices gain greater visibility and significance within the international conversation.”

But Art Warsaw is careful not to position itself as solely regional. “Alongside our commitment to representing the region, it’s equally important for us not to create something provincial,” Witek-Lipka says. “We’re proud to have brought together outstanding galleries not only from the region, but also from across Europe, the United States, Japan and Kazakhstan.”

That balance may be one of the fair’s defining strengths. The geography feels genuinely unexpected. A Japanese gallery appears alongside spaces from Riga and Kyiv. Emerging artist-run initiatives sit a stone’s throw from internationally established programmes. The result is a fair that feels neither derivative of Western European models nor narrowly regional.

During my time in the city, conversations repeatedly returned to Warsaw’s current momentum. Collectors, curators and artists spoke about the Polish capital with a sense of possibility. “Warsaw is definitely in a very strong moment right now,” Witek-Lipka says. “The city feels vibrant, confident and increasingly defined by its own identity.” She points to the city’s growing ecosystem of institutions, galleries and independent initiatives, alongside a rapidly expanding collector base. “Every year, more people are becoming interested not only in art itself, but also in collecting – and not just Polish art, but international art as well. It feels like a very good moment to build long-term relationships with the Polish audience.”

There were murmurs of significant sales circulating through the corridors, including reports of a painting changing hands for around €250,000 – a figure that would represent a major milestone for a fair still in the early stages of defining itself internationally. Whether discussing acquisitions, institutional visits or future collaborations, optimism felt tangible throughout Villa Róż.



Feature image: Hunt Kastner’s presentation featuring works by Dominika Dobiášová, Anna Hulačová and Eva Koťátková. Courtesy Art Warsaw